Sorting children by birthdate after they were entered

RootsMagic
1

How do you sort a group of children by birth date when they were entered differently?

2

Go to Family View>Click on Pencil>select Rearrange Children

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3

Actually, Pencil>Rearrange Children works in any view. It’s just that’s it’s usually easier to see the results are correct in Family View. Another good view for rearranging children is Descendant View set to 2 generations because you can see the order of the children easily from there.

Another way is Spouses>Children or Parents>Children at the top of the left side bar. If you do either one of these, a Rearrange Children button will appear at the top of the left side bar.

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4

Thanks. No global way to reset all children?

5

How come? Do you mean all children in your whole database? It’s global inside a family.

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6

Correct, no global way to rearrange all children in all families.

For better or worse, the RM design is loathe to make such global changes. The design is intended to give you as the user total control of such things as the order of the children.

I actually agree with this design to a certain extent. For example, you might have children in a certain order when birth dates are uncertain or unknown or when there are twins or triplets who you have in known birth order but RM can’t order them properly because their birthdates are the same. You would never want RM to rearrange children for you in such cases.

Where I disagree with the design is its unwillingness to default children to birth date order upon initial data entry. Upon initial data entry, RM has to put the newly added child somewhere. It presently puts the newly added child at the end of the list of children. So it is making the initial decision for you rather than you making the initial decision. It could instead default to birth date order on initial data entry. And by the way, GEDCOM import could count as initial data entry. Then if you subsequently rearranged the order of the children in any way and for any reason, I fully support that RM wouldn’t do any further automatic rearranging. This would give the user total control over the arrangement of the children while greatly simplifying the initial data entry for children. And it’s such a simple and common sense approach that I can’t imagine why it wasn’t implemented long ago.

7

I developed a sqlite procedure several years ago to batch reorder children by Birth date in those families that have not been modified from record order. It should be adaptible to RM8 because the required data fields are the same.
https://sqlitetoolsforrootsmagic.com/children-set-order-by-birth-sortdate/